I’m starting to wonder if my movie tastes have quietly drifted out of sync with the critical consensus. Not in a “everyone else is wrong” way, but in that slow realization that the movies hitting me hardest are often the ones getting the least praise, while the darlings of the season leave me cold. It’s the kind of disconnect that makes you reread reviews after the credits roll, half-expecting to discover you accidentally watched a different cut.
That feeling followed me after watching One Battle After Another, a film that left me drained and unsure why it didn’t seem to do the same for everyone else.
One Battle After Another is a black comedy action thriller written, produced and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The story centers on Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), lovers and members of a radical revolutionary group known as the French 75. During a raid, Perfidia takes Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) at gunpoint. What begins as an act of resistance spirals into sexual violence and a deeply unsettling obsession.
When a later robbery goes wrong and Perfidia kills a security guard, she agrees to enter witness protection, trading the names and locations of her fellow revolutionaries in exchange for avoiding prison.
Sixteen years later, Pat and Perfidia’s now teenage daughter, Charlene (Chase Infiniti), are living off the grid under the assumed names Bob and Willa Ferguson. Bob is consumed by paranoia, convinced that Lockjaw will eventually find them, and numbs his fear through drugs. Willa, meanwhile, longs to understand the truth about her mother and the life that came before.
Her curiosity is answered in the most dangerous way possible when Col. Lockjaw finally tracks them down, forcing long buried trauma and unfinished violence back into their lives.
This is where my disconnect with other critics really set in. A lot of the praise surrounding One Battle After Another seems rooted in its ambition and excess, but those same qualities kept me at arm’s length. I admire the swing, but the execution rarely worked for me on an emotional level. The film constantly feels like it wants to provoke, overwhelm and destabilize the viewer, yet that approach left me more exhausted than engaged.
Instead of leaning into its characters and letting their choices speak, it often opts for noise and exaggeration, which made it harder for me to invest in what was actually happening on screen.
Performance wise, Leonardo DiCaprio does solid work grounding Pat Calhoun in paranoia and mental decay, and Chase Infiniti brings a quiet curiosity and unease that gives the film some much needed humanity. Their scenes together feel lived in, and there is a genuine sense of fear and longing beneath the surface. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast rarely reaches that same level. Many performances feel either wildly over the top to the point of caricature or so thinly sketched that I struggled to care about their fate.
Instead of feeling like heightened reality, it often feels like actors performing ideas, rather than people.
The film’s discordant piano score only amplified that distance. It plays almost constantly, hammering away during scenes that would have benefited from restraint or silence. I understand the intention behind it, to reflect chaos, anxiety and moral imbalance, but the execution felt heavy handed. There were multiple moments where the score actively drowned out dialogue, pulling my attention away from the performances and toward the mechanics of the film itself. Rather than immersing me in the tension, it kept reminding me that I was being pushed to feel unsettled, which had the opposite effect.
Then there’s the runtime, which felt punishing. The film stretches its ideas far past the point where they remain impactful, repeating emotional beats without adding new insight. By the final act, I found myself checking out not because I didn’t care how it ended, but because I was ready for it to be over regardless of the destination. That seems to be another point where I part ways with many critics. What they saw as daring and uncompromising, I experienced as indulgent and overextended. There is a sharper, more effective version of this film buried inside its runtime, but the one we get left me wishing for the end credits long before they finally arrived.
I ultimately give One Battle After Another three out of five stars, and that rating rests almost entirely on the strength of the performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Chase Infiniti. They provide the emotional anchor the film desperately needs, grounding a story that too often feels bloated, abrasive, and self-indulgent. While I respect the ambition and understand why many critics champion its chaos and excess, the combination of uneven performances, an overbearing score, and an exhausting runtime kept me from fully connecting with it.
Maybe this really is one of those moments where my taste has drifted away from the consensus, but for me, One Battle After Another is a film I admired more than I enjoyed, and one that ultimately reinforced the uneasy feeling that I am simply not seeing the same movie everyone else is praising.